Joseph Severn’s Significantly Borderline Correspondence
Joseph Severn’s Significantly Borderline Correspondence

Summary/Abstract: Long relegated to a marginal post in Romantic studies, as the chronicler of Keats’s last days and custodian of his posthumous reception, Joseph Severn was given an intriguing rebirth at the start of the twenty-first century: first, with Grant F. Scott’s modern scholarly edition of Severn’s Letters and Memoirs (2005), and, then, with Sue Brown’s engaging biography (2009). These twin achievements made a persuasive case for reappraising Severn’s life and legacy, inviting us to see him not only as a one dimensional coterie figure (the timeless, static, and sometimes vain, “friend of Keats”) but also as a dynamic artist-cum-diplomat whose work – straddling temporal, geographical, cultural and generic borders – merits greater consideration. The present article sets out to examine one facet of this freshly fleshed-out figure: namely, his mobile epistolary persona, seen through the prism of crossings. With more attention than ever being paid to transnational Romanticism but also to the “poetics” of Romantic-period letters, one might wonder if Severn’s private correspondence can reward sustained critical focus. Severn’s epistolary writing is interesting for the light it sheds not only on his illustrious contemporaries but also on the porous borders he came to embody. As a borderline achievement in its own right, it offers a meaningful case study in Romantic border crossings and the performative rewriting of the self across place and time.

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